I use Mercurial to manage everything, including my static HTML pages. It makes life really, really easy for me.
Benefits include
- All the perks version control offers (rollbacks, milestone tags, etc)
- Being able to clone your site in a hurry
- You always have a working local backup / copy
- Easy to keep in sync if you tend to make changes en situ (in place, on the server)
- Most shared hosts (if your dealing with one) don't mind installing it
Disclaimer, I wrote the tutorial. Yes, the kind of VCS you use does matter, to a degree. For instance, I would not use something in this scenario where I could not commit locally and make one big push / update. That just forces me to lump too many potentially problematic changes into one commitment.
I could do it with Subversion, and I'm not knocking SVN at all. I just think Mercurial is a far better tool for the problem you are trying to solve.
Its my opinion that you should not have to 'work around' your tools unless you have no other choice. Doing so sort of defeats the purpose of having them, and you do have a choice :)